Would you like to see a picture of Dalra, proud enhancement shaman, in action on the Spine of Deathwing?

Just in case that is difficult to make out, here, let me zoom out a bit.

There in the center you can see the raid group on the Hideous Amagamations in the center, up and down the line.

And there, up in the upper right hand corner, you can see Dalra, all on her own, killing a tentacle. As an Enhancement Shaman. All there, all alone, killing tentacles. Spawning adds. Lots and lots of adds.

And here is something I didn’t know. If all the tentacles are dead, a new tentacle spawns, so there is no chance of your ever accidentally killing every Hideous Amalgamation and being left with no way to nuclear blast the plates off to expose the tentacle.

I. Did. Not. Know. That.

But now I do, and I have Dalra to thank for that. So, thanks!

24 people in a raid trying their best to win and move on, and those 24 people are subject to the whims of one person, a person who has the achievement and the title of having completed it on normal, who knows what it is they are doing, and who chooses to try and screw everyone else intentionally.

For fun, I guess.

And there is nothing anyone can do about it. that is the point of this post. Once the boss is pulled, that’s it. The group has no control in any way over the outcome from that point on.

You’re done. Wipe it or push on, beat it despite them, and give them their ‘fair’ chance at loot.

Once that boss is pulled, that player is free to do whatever the hell they want for the rest of the fight.

I want to be clear on this.

The issue is not Dalra.Dalra is nothing.

Nothing unusual or special or even especially irritiating went on tonight. If Dalra logged off with warm fuzzies knowing they got a second Deathwing Axe and relic drops tonight (according to the Armory) by queueing as a healer for insta-queues, doing enhance DPS while the group was down a healer, and even intentionally screwing people by trying to wipe the run if what she wanted didn’t drop… well, most people didn’t even notice.

Apathy and expectations are so low at this point that nobody really cared. It was just faceless, nameless asshat number 45862. As the picture shows, the tone of comments weren’t outrage, just tired acceptance. “No joke, I’m tired of morons in LFR.” That’s not nerd rage, that’s apathy and acceptance that stupid is just stupid.

We went on with some other faceless clown in LFR, and finished the run. Most people, I imagine, don’t even realize that it was on purpose. They are probably so used to stupid people by now, that if anything, they just pegged Dalra as being another in a long chain of incredibly stupid players, and went on with their lives.

I know better, because after Monday night I went into Spine looking at all the tentacles to see if I could identify another asshat and get some screenshots for my own fun. AND I DID. I watched while healing my whack-a-mole frames, as Dalra didn’t even start on the normal group tentacle. Right from the start, they went to an untouched one, destroyed it very fast, went to the next, destroyed it, and so on until all four were dead. Then kept killing tentacles as they respawned. Then, when the first plate lifted, killed more tentacles. As fast as they could pop.

There was no mistake, no confusion. It was a dedicated attempt by Dalra to wipe a raid from the second it triggered Spine. And I caught it early, notified everyone, began asking for Dalra to stop right away. There was nothing anyone could do to stop her. Just watch, and do our best to heal and kill.

If anything, anyone in the guild Shining Star Crusaders should feel ashamed that Dalra is carrying your torch, representing you. I don’t know anything about Shining Star Crusaders, maybe it’s a guild on Icecrown famous for shenanigans and being trolling asshats. Maybe it’s just some dude in a basement that is so ineffectual in real life that they have to do stuff like this to feel some kind of connection with someone else. Some kind of desperate bid for attention, any kind of attention, to rise out of the meaningless morass that is their pathetic excuse for a life, something to try and prevent themselves from feeling so cold and alone in a world that hates them. And they’ve got a personal guild full of their alts. I don’t really care.

My take is as likely to be accurate as anyones, and mine at least is based on personal experience seeing one of their guild members at play when they didn’t know they were being watched somewhere that it might turn up in public later.

Update: Some folks in reading this thought it was an actual slam on the guild mentioned. I thought I had stressed in the post, fairly bluntly, that I was speculating wildly on the kind of guild that had Dalra as a member, while at the same time knowing nothing whatsoever about the truth of the guild. That I was speculating like this or ‘musing aloud’ to prove the point that Dalra was serving as my only window on the kind of guild SSC might be, because in LFR cross-server activities, I didn’t have any way of knowing anyone in that guild prior to seeing one memeber in LFR be an asshat, which is entirely UNLIKE the old style single-server runs where guilds could form lasting recognizable reputations. In point of fact, after this post went live and word about Dalra got out, SSC took immediate action, removed Dalra from their roster, and took further action to make it clear that kind of behavior was not representative of their guild in real life. Clearly, in real life the guild SSC is not actually a single kid in a basement. Some of the responses (on each side) also showed me pretty clearly that a lot of people fail at reading comprehension. At least, they do where imagined insults and direct attacks are concerned. End of update, I now return you to the original post.

Dalra is not important. This post isn’t really about Dalra.

I am simply USING Dalra as my little bitch to make a point about an extremely serious issue in live LFR.

There needs to be a check on anti-group asshats after the boss is pulled.

There has to be a way to remove or curtail intentional trolling or flagrant wipe behavior.

“But Bear”, I hear you cry, “You can’t let people boot other players once the boss is engaged, people might kick them right before the loot rolls like in the bad old days of Argent Tournament.”

To that I say, I don’t care anymore. If it salves your conscience, let them have their roll at loot if they were in the group after the boss was pulled, so long as they were kicked and not disconnected or left of their own free will. Maybe require 10 people to all click “Accept”.

But you have to give us some options here. This shit isn’t even remotely funny. This one person tried to cause intentional mental anguish to 24 other people. Whether anyone else in the group felt strongly affected, or if they just blew it off and kept going, the intent was the same.

We asked Dalra not to kill the tentacles, we begged them, we told them they were kicked the second we wiped if they didn’t stop. They did it anyway, with grim dedication, and in total silence. No taunting, no smack talk, just a dedicated pursuit of wiping the raid.

And when we wiped, we did not kick them, because they left the second we wiped.

We queued, and Dalra was added back to the raid. And left on her own. And was added back. And again. AND AGAIN!

The LFR raid finder KEPT RETURNING DALRA BACK TO THE RAID, because Dalra had succeeded in wiping us once, knew we were going to kick her, so had left on her own and requeued AS A HEALER to find a new raid to screw over.

So, since they hadn’t been kicked from us, we kept getting her right back. Five times, in and left, in and left, with the raid in growing amazement at the way the system was being played.

We finally stopped queueing and did it short a healer.

That’s not just stupid, that’s broken.

Blizzard, anyone out there, I know you care, I know you’re trying.

Please. Just take action, let us find out what it is after you’ve got a plan, but fix this. To have asshats free to wreak havok to this extent on a raid is an embarrassment.

Updated (April 14th 2012): I have had two emails from the purported guild leader of Shining Star Crusaders stating that Dalra was a member for only 4 days, and regardless is now gone from the guild. The guild leader is emphatic about wanting to have the name of their guild dissassociated with Dalras action while a part of their guild, and I certainly don’t blame them.

If you are following this article, or have come here from a followed link, please be aware that there is no character named Dalra that is a current member of the guild Shining Star Crusaders according to WoW Armory, and please do not direct any unprofessional or inappropriate comments to the guild members.

63 thoughts on “I Have Met the Asshat, and it is Dalra”

And this scenario above is why I never once considered using LFR before I let my subscription lapse. After the horrible LFD groups that I encountered every other time I queued (including way too many jerks who queued as a healer only to show up and DPS and try to bully someone else into doing the job) I was concerned LFR would be the same, only amplified by the # of people. At a minimum, it would be good if you could stop LFR from reassigning the same horrible person to your group over and over. That’s just…evil, really.

The probem is that the fight is meant to be done a certain way in normal, but when they scaled it back for LFR, they simply removed a few abilities left the rest alone. There is no reaosn that deathwing should still be able to roll in LFR, no reason you shoul dbe able to attack multiple tentacles. Simply making the other tentacles immune if an amalgam is up would solve the issue. Well, not the issue, but this particular fight. I’ve seen a few Darlas in LFR, some being purposfully asshatish, some from tunnelvisioned stupidity. You call to stop DPS on the amalgam so it gets more blood, you tell people to stop attacking tentacles, they don’t listen, they don’t pay attention, they outright ignore you or laugh about it in /raid. They simply shouldn’t be ABLE to troll an entire raid and waste people’s time like that. Hell, Blizz, put a ready-check before any boss engages for that matter. I’ve seen way too many people start the Madness or Gunship fights when the group is half full or still buffing, hunters that put up aspect of pack during lightning on Hagara, not click buttons on ultraxxion simply because it doesn’t kill them outright and they know the healers will get them back up. At least the loot is definitely getting fixed, just today my rogue lost the tier token to another rogue in LFR…who already had 4 piece 497 tier.

That said I DO really like LFR, it gives me something to do on alts, a reason to keep playing them and running and see the fights as other classes that I probably wouldn’t ever use on a normal run. It also gives people that don’t normaly raid for whatever reason a chance to do it. Going forward in LFR, I just hope blizzard stops making fights where one guy can screw over a raid, and stops making fights where ignoring mechanics doesn’t kill you. Make it obvious, give people a big huge alert of THIS WILL KILL YOUR DUMB ASS! and let em die if they ignore it. Punish peope for not doing what they are supposed to be doing, don’t punish everyone because ONE guy doesn’t.

I experienced the exact same thing happen a week or two ago in LFR. It was clearly intentional, on spine, and the person ignored all the requests to stop. Can’t recall if they left or if we booted them after the wipe.

There ought to be a kick vote such that if you manage to get more than 20 people to vote yes, you’re flagged and can’t requeue for 4 hours – on any toon in that account. That should be incentive enough to quell the asshattery.

Except that people would need to actually check the reasons also. Imo it seems people just press yes if the vote kick question pops up. And punishing people for getting trolled like that would be a really really bad idea.

I can’t find it now, but I read a blue post a while back wherein they said they were going to take griefing in LFR more seriously. I think the most obvious type of reportable griefing is pulling the boss to wipe the group and leaving the group immediately. This case doesn’t fall into that category, and it is possible some stubborn CS may insist it’s just a player “using different tactics” on the boss, which is “not provably griefing”.

However, his consistent leaving and requeuing to keep doing the same thing 5x on a boss he needed nothing from should contribute weight to the evidence of griefing.

Also, not sure if you tried. You could have used Leap of Faith on cd and maybe just maybe the healer-cum-DPS would have taken the hint. If it had been a 10 man raid i would have made sure everyone was on the same page and made DW barrel-roll. Goodbye shammy.

Didn’t try Leap of Faith. In fact, I tend to forget I have it. Only ever used it once so far, and then it was for a good reason, not mischief.

Oh, and it’s okay, I won tier helm from the boat on LFR, so the pain is worth it. Just… blog fodder. It’s not anger-inducing so much as, “here is a person who has fond every loophole, and is taking advantage of ALL of them in an attempt to ruin other peoples evenings. Why hasn’t Blizzard addressed this yet?”

as WoWMidas said, most LFR runs I’m in are just fine. This is only noteworthy because it’s been every time I’ve queued as a healer, so unusual. I can tell you this is VERY out of the ordinary, most FLRs I go on never wipe.

I vote that hunters or frost mages be able to entomb them in ice … I’ve not even got a go at lfr yet – my one toon apparently eligible is pvp geared and I dont’ think that is fair on the raid so she doesn’t get to go in and my healer … she’s a couple of bits of gear short … well the lfr tells me she is not eligible yet … so … I’m all for entombing them in ice and not letting them roll on anything …

but yer … let these characters die rather than saving them from themselves and then congratulate yourselves for trying to do it down one healer.

I thought this way too earlier. But if you actually know your class I’d say just go for it in pvp gear. You’ll prob not top meters, but you’ll be pretty close if my lfr runs are any indication. A friend who just got back in wow joined a lfr run in full 390 pvp gear last week and convinced me it’s totally viable. I think he was 3rd-10th depending on fight.

@Kobay – So far, ignores have prevented me from seeing people in LFD for a second time. My ignore list is LOADED with people like this.

What’s worse is that Spine isn’t the only place where people are intentionally assholes. Allow me to illustrate.

Morchok – They’ll stay mounted, then pull a bunch of trash when the boss gets pulled.

Yorsahj, Who Needs Nappies – Multiple trash pack pulls, OR they’ll use YorsahjPriority (a handy addon) and modify the outputs so that they’re the wrong ones for the boss fight.

Hagara – Hunters will use Aspect of the Pack during a lightning chain – damage from the lightning slows you so you can’t get back to Hagara before her debuff wears off.

Ultraxion – I’ve watched Paladins bubble the tanks.

Warmaster – Priests using lifegrip to pull people out of the pools.

Spine – I’ve been in groups with tanks pulling exploding amalgamations to the raid just for kicks. Or even to the back of the spine.

Madness – Group of 10 who went out of their way to jump to a different platform, causing Madness to trigger two Assaults at once.

I’ve hit the point where I don’t even want to bother with LFR anymore. I wanted to be able to gear up a couple extra alts for the expansion, and I just can’t stomach it. If half the raid isn’t completely clueless, then it’s some jackass being a douchebag that wrecks a run. I have yet to be in a single LFR that hasn’t spawned some sort of filth and/or bile.

I’d sooner create DS-alt runs for my guild, or put together a premade LFR consisting of 19 other people I know from various mediums to cover important roles, and letting in five random DPSers for the opportunity to have a nice LFR run for a change. Let the assholes ruin someone else’s game.

I know it doesn’t address the central point but, in LFR at least, you should be required to have a spec that matches the role you are queueing for. When you join the raid, if your current spec doesn’t match your role, it should be switched automatically (switching back when you leave) and you should only be able to manually switch to a spec that fulfils your role. It doesn’t stop someone being an intentional asshat (except that I would consider queueing as a healer then showing up in melee DPS spec and gear griefing), but it would have blunted this guy’s effectiveness; a resto shaman wouldn’t have been nearly as effective at soloing the tentacles.

People can be annoying eh. I’m not sure if I agree it’s Blizz who should fix this. Then again, I guess they’re the only ones who can. Asshats will never grow up.
Good thing you name and shame this guy, I hope his GM kicks him out for such stupid behaviour. Even though that’s not the point of your post, I still hope it happens.

Sometimes I see the fun of it, but then it needs to be done smartly.

One time, this pally, made sure that on the trash before Yorsahj he couldnt be kicked by constantly pulling a new pack. So he kept the group in combat, but he didnt wipe us. He made sure that he only pulled a new pack, right as the old ones bit the dust. And everyone was complaining, but 1 simple lifegrip would have taken him out of his play. No one did. You could see him sneak off halfway one group of oozes, wait patiently for them to go down, and then pull a new one just before going out of combat. I have to admit that I smiled at that one.
He left himself before the boss had to be pulled :)

I had a conversation on Twitter about this exact same subject last night, where we threw around a couple of possible suggestions to deal with it. Sadly, I don’t think you can guard against the rogue player, because there is the possibility that even a (normally) competent player could ‘have a moment’ and do something like this.

What this does do is give those people who don’t enjoy stupidity a chance to create their own places (like Twitterland Raiding) where they know people will turn up and do the job properly. I suspect one of the long-term solutions to this problem will be allowing people to LFR cross-server with their own organisational terms, thus creating a self-policing environment.

Oh, and I’m not sure if the Tweet I saw was serious or not, but this isn’t misogyny, it’s stupidity. The person playing this character should know better.

Bear, I feel for you. the current reporting system is horribly broken and useless. I’ve personally taken the trouble of filing a GM ticket/complaint against this kind of asshat before ( in my case, a healer who went AFK after the boss pull) and received the usual form reply that Blizzard will investigate but won’t tell you the results bla bla … nothing changes.

1. Not healing them doesn’t work. It’s not like they’re getting two-shotted. With half a dozen healers using healbot and folks casting heals that pick the wounded players, that player is going to get healed.

2. People generally hate losing more than they like winning. From some of the posts, you’d get the impression that all runs have griefers. They don’t. Most have players making mistakes, of course, usually noobs that don’t know what to do (will always be this way, since it takes a few runs to learn), or the lazy, but in my experience (probably ran LFR fifty times, perhaps more), most runs have no wipes. Some do of course, and one or two were a memorable disaster (I recall 1h15m on DW once due to multiple wipes), but those are the exception rather than the rule.

That fight is interesting for me as DPS because I usually just end up standing there, zapping a few bloods.

But what makes me cry is that the Dalras are pissing in the punch bowl for us all, in every aspect of life. Oh Bear. Had a long talk with my most important person yesterday afternoon about this–I don’t want to go back to the days of life before LFR and dungeon finder, but damn, why is it the one, the ONE ruins it for all? Disturbing on so many counts.

I added that part in as part of the whole, to show how one person can game the system to take maximum advantage of the opportunity to troll. By being allowed to queue as a healer and take advantage of the demand making for instant queue times, despite being specced as DPS, that person was abusing the system because the system allowed it.

I have accidentally queued as tank before when i was specced at the moment and expecting to DPS, and had all my DPS gear on. I dropped group immediately, but it still happened. Mistakes occur.

Maybe it’s a simple fix: when one queues for something, the God in the Machine simply reads the output and alerts the raid and player of this error, stops the fight cold. readjusts it, and let’s everyone start over, no harm, no foul. With all the data and technology available, I mean for heaven’s sake, there are real fixes. But on the other hand, the more we hand over to the robot overlords, possibly at our peril.

But here is the thing: what these asshats steal is our most precious thing–time. We can’t get it back. We want to be with our loved ones, enjoy our jobs, and play with meaning. I have a Dalra in my real life right now, and that is essentially it, she is stealing my time.

So, if we fix that–the time stealers–perhaps we can make this machine run more smoothy.

You’re no Asshat Matty. That Dalra person is an asshat. I haven’t done LFR in so long but it’s a real shame people like this ruin it for others. The instant queue for healers who are actually DPSers is so common now that I remember the last LFR I did we had 3 healers. Me being one of them. The rest were not healing. And they dare roll on my gear? How I wish we could have one day a year where we could cross faction raid :) just for fun.

the God in the Machine simply reads the output and alerts the raid and player of this error, stops the fight cold. readjusts it, and let’s everyone start over, no harm, no foul

Sadly, if this were the case these same people would queue incorrectly just to keep the fight restarting over and over.

They will be jerks because there’s no reason for them NOT to be jerks, no penalty for misbehavior, and apparently there’s great entertainment value in griefing. Me, I’d rather see them unable to enter ANY raid instance on ANY toon associated with that b.net account for two weeks after being reported and investigated for such behavior. Double the penalty with each repeat offense. Eventually they’d learn not to be jerks, or else they’d only be able to raid once a yea, which would also solve the problem.

Been in many a group especially on Ultraxxion, watching as these terrible tanks that don’t know how to taunt are just letting people die, not swapping out for fading light. Grumble, grumble, grumble, stupid bad tanks need to do their job. *reads raid chat* “Kick the other tank, Elladrion is just DPSing!” Oh shoot, I was tanking some heroics earlier…oops.

I feel your pain, Bear, but don’t be too discouraged. Most of the runs that I’ve been in (for two 85s, druid and pally) have been successful.

However, I will give you an example from last night to reinforce what you are talking about. Our group got to….Yorzogj? The one with the oozes. Anyway, one of the DPS, as we pulled the first pack of adds, ran forward and pulled the other groups and the boss. His name was Jubil or somethin’ like that (I watched him die, I’m observant like that). The boss reset thankfully, but with all the blue blobs the healers didn’t have a chance. Kicked him of course.

After regrouping, we pulled the first pack thinking everything would be fine, and ANOTHER DPS, I believe his name was Forces, runs and does the EXACT same thing. Of course, people were on the lookout this time and everyone started calling his name in raid. Boot. Closer observation of my recount found that they were from the same server, separate guilds. Likely they were RealID friends.

I’ve got their names noted on a notepad at home on my desktop and will be speaking with their GMs when I get back home tonight. That’s right, I’ll create a lvl1 and speak with their GMs. Some would say that I’m the one being an ass-hat about it, and even some of my guildies (my guild runs LFR together) say it’s not worth it, but I feel that even if no action is taken (not really expecting any) something should be said.

But hang in there, Bear. It’s really not as bad as what you’ve been having lately, I promise.

I like the Misdirect idea, even a single hunter could do it as soon as one of the Amalgamations popped. I don’t think most classes would be able to survive even a single Amal without someone healing them. I’ve seen the Morchok ‘trick’, pulling trash during the fight. The problem was that it took several pulls to narrow down the two people doing it – they were doing their best to blame others so people felt the need to see it for themselves.

I’ve seen one prank that I thought was funny…it’s become normal for people to run to Hagara and summon the slower folks – “So-and-so wants to summon you to the Eye of Eternity”. So a minute or two after Yorshaj goes down, the summons dialog pops and we find ourselves in….the Eye of Eternity. Facing Malygos. Someone (probably the perpetrator) pulls and there’s nothing to do but kill him. No one died, it cost us 5 minutes, and I thought it was clever and funny. Even got the achievement for killing him with less than 21 people. Luckily there was someone back at Hagara who could summon us back, or it might have been less amusing. There were a couple of people irate but it cost us less time than pulling trash.

BBB, I’ve taken to checking the healing meters on recount after the first boss. i don’t care about ‘performance’ (well, I do but I don’t take issue with a barely geared healer doing his best) but if I see someone queued as a healer ranked on the DPS charts and not on the healing charts I’ll mention it in raid and try to initiate a vote to kick. Enough people run meters and will verify that it almost always results in the person getting booted. It helps mitigate one type of ass-hattery at least.

On my shaman my MS is resto, OS is enhancement. I’ve queued as a healer in my enh spec and gear before by accident. It wasn’t noticed until we wiped on Ultraxion. I apologized and changed specs to what I queued as, thankfully they didn’t kick me. So yeah, accidents do happen.

Was in an LFR on my paladin Tuesday night when a player from Vodka(yes, THAT guild) did the EXACT thing as your Dalra did on spine. We wiped, booted him, and moved on. I was very shocked to see someone from a top world guild intentionally grief a raid like that.

Add a second voting system that if it passes flags the person as unfriendly like in arenas so that your group can DPS them. If the are killed by a player while flagged they are automatically booted from the raid and can’t join for 1/2 hour

The same has happened to me in the past but what we do is after we identify the culprit we drop everyone from the same server
The reasoning being this.
If we boot people they will be angry at the individual Who caused them to be booted and being on the same server
Gives them plenty of time to discuss things with their “friend”

Darla is one of many, like you said. There are more and more of them appearing as well. There is always a shadow priest, retribution paladin, boomkin or enhancement shaman that rolled as a healer just for instant queue. There is also someone that will not switch to slimes and if you get more than a few you have to deal with what can be best described of as heroic LFR. There is always a tank that has less life then my healer. There is always someone that will auto attack or a healer that only heals themselves. There is always some asshat that does it because they are lazy, stupid or trolling. Perhaps all three.

Then again, there is some times, on rare occasion, when you go with a partial guild group that runs into another partial guild group and you run through it as if you had always been together. No need for talking, for telling people what to do, just everyone doing there job. Then when the raid ends and you look at the DPS on madness, after it was done to perfection, and the lowest DPS is 52K and the lowest HPS is 20K and you think to yourself why can’t every run be like this. Is it really too hard to play the game the way it should be played?

And then someone in the looking for raid answers that question for you without you even asking by saying… but it is only the LFR.

Maybe they do not grasp the concept that if everyone acted like them, acted like “it is only the LFR” then no boss would ever be downed because when everyone has that attitude, nothing can be accomplished.

Some people do not grasp the concept that yes, it might be easy with 25 normal geared players to down things with ignoring some mechanics but in the LFR you are bound to have people that are only LFR capable which means, you need to do the mechanics correctly, even if “it is only the LFR”.

I wish Blizz would implement a player “ranking” system like Ebay does for their sellers. People could downrank or uprank each player based on negative or positive behaviors. Unfortunately it would not be a cure for scumbags like dalra, but I’d bet alot of the wow losers would rethink their actions while grouped.

As a proud member of the Alliance side of Icecrown US, I’d just like to let you know someone on Icecrown noticed this and posted it on the server forums. Good luck to her ever getting in a raid now lol.

Im getting sick of the ass hattery happening in LFR, IIve got to the point now where I report them to Blizz, stating that theyre griefing and all that name – relam- time – where, I know blizz wont tell me what happens but I realise that if Blizz gets enough griefing reports for this one player then somethign may happen.

Saying all that there are also the flawless runs Ive been on that ROCK! Usually theres people Ive queued in with and one or two of have taken some of the key roles such as tank or heals – love those ones!

This is the effect of “more accessible raid content” in my most humble of opinions. Nearly every LFR I ever ran had some kind of major asshat in it being a downer. Either some elitist pro, demanding to kick low dps (despite one shotting every boss), or some dude doing things wrong on purpose.

Harassment has always been prevalent in gaming (not just WoW), but in the old days it took quite a lot of dedication to raid. To even start to raid, you had to go through long quests, run tons of heroics, and put in the time. It was an epic experience, for epic rewards. And you were nervous when you stepped in. Fun nervous, but nervous, you didn’t want to mess up. You wanted to do your best, because your name mattered.

Now, everybody can see all of the game they paid for. This all by itself is a good thing. But the trade off my friends, is if everybody gets to swim in the “cool pool”, you will inevitably have somebody peeing in it for fun. It’s human nature.

Putting up with it is the price of admission, a price I no longer am willing to pay.

Amen! This is exactly the problem. Blizzard has no desire whatsoever to fix this. Everyone is a paying customer to them. They changed the entire game so that it no longer matters who you are and what you do, almost entirely removing any social investment. Everybody is “equal” now and isn’t that wonderful.

Copey – you said it. But I guess I am still willing to pay, because otherwise I would miss out on moments when a buddy gets his legendary rogue daggers, and wants to break them in with me on a few runs–for those moments I am geared and ready. I don’t blame others for not wanting to play, don’t misunderstand me. I’m only thinking about why I do (why am I putting up with that nonsense?!) And it’s only one cool pool — the functional guilds (and I’ve heard tell that there are some) still have a ‘members only’ cache (which I have no issues with either.)

Has anyone noticed a language issue too? I have seen a great amount of racism, which I find disgusting, but sometimes the tanks/raid leaders don’t speak the same language as everyone else – not that anyone shouldn’t know what to do when without someone calling it out. I have no suggestions for this- be kind of cool if when in LFR or LFD you hit the language of your race, and when you type in chat it is translated from your native tongue (although the rise in international incidents over nerd rage comments would increase.) Nvermind. Going to shut up now.

I think I stopped doing LFR after about four weeks of 4.3, the reason being the huge amount of people just like the person you described. I got some gear, and then I joined my guild for raid progression.
I hope we will never be able to kick people during loot rolls, though – you know how loot crazy people are, imagine how often you could get booted just because you rolled on someone’s gear and that someone brought their guildmates to votekick around. It would be even worse during busy bossfights where people just want the window in the middle of their screen to go away.

I wish I could say ‘light up, it’s just an unlucky experience’, but it’s really one of so many – I’d really recommend steering clear of LFR if you are able to raid or queueing with friends to make it bearable (that and you get griefed a lot less than on your own).

thats funny and sad at the same time…
Fortunately I havnt seen a bad lfr troll like this in my runs , may be its just worse on us side (i am on eu) . But sometimes there are some harmless and fun trolls too , like the one where someone summoned the raid to malygos. Or the 5 priests who decided its fun to ping-pong the tank (me) between themselves with life grip, driving melee dps nuts who were trying to stay on boss which was moving around trying to chase me.

Honestly, you have a recourse already available to you by Blizzard. Report them. Everyone in the raid report the person. Blizz has a database on all the actions the person took, and will know that 24 other people are telling the truth. Then Blizz can (and should) ban the player’s account for 30 days for griefing. Honestly, that’s their solution.

And you are perfectly correct that it is appears to be apathy on our parts as the player base to normally do nothing….though I truly think it is acceptance. Not acceptance in the behavior, on the contrary we do NOT accept that being a giant DB or AH is normative. No, we accept that we really cannot do anything about it. How will you affect change in that player? By telling them to stop and that’s not how its done, do we expect them suddenly stop and say, “Oh! My bad. apologies, I didn’t realize!” Of course not. We already know why they are doing it..and “it” could be intentionally wiping the raid, using profanity or insulting language over and over again, etc etc. any behavior that is contrary to the task at hand.

Point is…we as players cannot stop other players from behaving like this. We can point out its wrong. We can discuss the merits or lack thereof. We can beg and plead Blizz to do better at curbing this. But really…the many are at the mercy of the few in this case. For better or worse. The age old phrase that applies is…One bad apple spoils the bunch.

I spoke with an officer of this guild today, as they are on my server, to let them know about this. The officer informed me that they had removed this person from their guild already and did not know about this until I sent them the link. Sounds like the bad seed had already weeded itself out there as well as your run.

I was one of those asshats on LFR the other night. It was 1 am my time and I was exhuasted but couldn’t sleep. I was doing great and then Spine comes along and I automatically went to “Normal 10 man” mode. And I stopped dps before I killed the one tentacle and switched to the amalgamation but they still booted me in the MIDDLE of the fight. But if you’re saying that they can’t boot you in the middle of a fight, then they must’ve started the vote kick process BEFORE Spine started. That was the only mistake I had made the whole night and I was doing really good DPS, so why would they all want to vote kick a BM hunter who is top 5 in dps? Because I rolled need on a piece of loot from Warmaster and LOST THE ROLL?

I have had two emails from the purported guild leader of Shining Star Crusaders, stating that Dalra was a member for only 4 days, and is now gone from the guild. The guild leader is emphatic about wanting to have the name of their guild dissassociated with Dalras action while a part of their guild.

If you are following this article or have come here from a followed link, please be aware that there is no character named Dalra that is a current member of the guild Shining Star Crusaders, and please do not direct any unprofessional or inappropriate comments their way.

“It was a dedicated attempt by Dalra to wipe a raid from the second it triggered Spine.”

You have absolutely no proof of this at all… For all you know Dalra was just trying to spawn Amalgamations to get loads of adds up to Lava Bust and try to Rank? Get over it, it’s LFR, if you have 2 decent Tanks and 1 decent healer, it doesn’t matter HOW many corruptions someone kills or how many amalgamations are up, the fight is still piss easy. Stop bitching about LFR, if you don’t want to come across these scenarios, do normal/hc runs!

I love how people can rip on one person from a guild, and then assume that the rest of the people in the guild are worthless. I guarantee that I can out-heal Bear any day/time. I’m a proud member of Shining Star Crusaders. I don’t care that we are currently only 3/8 in DS 10. I’m also the raid leader in the guild, and I don’t care what guild you come from, what server. Our players that stick around are of the highest quality, and you will not find a more helpful guild on any server. In response to Ceara, how do you badmouth a guild that you have no part in? You can site our progression all you like. We haven’t been raiding until just a couple of weeks ago. Before you open your mouth, and think that you are clever please do some valid research into making a statement that our guild isn’t good in any way.
People like Dalra should not color your opinion of an entire guild. Most of the members within our guild do not even realize he was in the guild and is now gone. As for bigbearbutt, you say that the person that emailed you is the purported guild leader, and I am here to confirm that they are in fact the guild master.
If people have a problem with someone in LFR, have everyone in the group report them, kick the person, or do both.

@Aleitheia – Maybe I should have been clearer with my comment. The link was purely used to show that Dalra had left. The comment about shame was a hope that Dalra had realised their mistake and left rather than having to be /gkicked.

Let me be very clear, so I don’t give out the wrong message this time. No slur was intended to Shining Star Crusaders. The fact that you are 3/8 in DS10 is 3 more than I am – good luck with your progression.

You need to calm down and realize wowprogress also shows who leaves and joins a guild, not just progression. As Ceara then proceeded to comment about Dalra leaving, it’s pretty obvious that was what she was referring to.